Sticks and carrots

With the start of school, Mother Nature decided that it was time to get back to normal weather patterns - so long glorious English summer of 2013 (truly glorious!), hello stereotypical grey damp autumn. The mornings have had that lovely bite to the air that means true woolen season is just around the corner. This is absolutely my favorite time of year (although I could do with a bit less rain...).

With the newly autumnal temperatures comes the ever predictable bout of startitis - I find myself wanting to cast on ALL THE THINGS! And to be fair, there are quite a number of things I should be casting on - two sample knits for patterns to be released next month first off, not to mention finishing off a shawl that's been on the needles for a couple of months now. But I find myself obsessed with the idea of casting on the perfect fall sweater - roomy, cozy, with long sleeves that come down over my hands and fronts that can wrap around. More specifially, I want the perfect fall sweater knit out of this.

My combo sweater spin from last winter when I was putting the miniSpinner through it's paces. So this week, I succumbed to the overwhelming desire to cast on, and knit...a swatch.

I think I've got the right needle size worked out, and I know the borders and cuffs are going to be in moss stitch.

Now it's just a question of using this project as a carrot to get the other stuff done. But if I play my cards right (and am a good designer do-bee), I can have a new sweater soon. I. Can't. Wait.

Before the crawl

Saturday is the first inaugural Great London Yarn Crawl, and I've been busy finalizing last details and pulling together door prizes. Since I'm not going to have a chance to do much yarn buying of my own on the day, I've been doing my best to make up for it.

When I got some more Spud & Chloe Sweater last week, I slipped on the way to the till and came up with 2 skeins of Fyberspates Scrumptious laceweight.

This is going to become a crocheted (!) cardigan somewhere down the line.

Then, this weekend, I got in to serious trouble over at Kettle Yarn Co. On Sunday, Linda handed me a lovely wrapped package with the following goodies.

Baby Alpaca/Merino/Bamboo Aran weight. This is going to become an Amor Deliria hat for the public release of the pattern next month.

Alpaca/Merino/Nylon sport weight. Not sure what this will become, but it's amazingly soft.

Falkland/Tencel fingering weight for a shawlette design.

So gorgeous and soft and squishy. I can't wait to crack into these!

Hi, I'm porpoise and I'm a sheep-aholic

I've become a bit obsessed with sheep lately. Some of you may be less then shocked by this pronouncement, but I'm talking about wool on the hoof, not in the skein. So on our recent trip to the northern portions of England, I found myself taking far too many pictures of sweaters-to-be in their natural environment. This tendency was vastly enhanced by the fact that in Yorkshire, there are just a few sheep to be ogled.

There were sheep on the way to the Reeth Agricultural Show,

BFL!
Not to mention, a few sheep at the show itself.

Texel

Swaledale

A highly groomed Teeswater (I think)

a spectacular Jacob ram

Dalesbred

Hampshire Down, aka the Teddy Bear Sheep

More BFL

A genteel sufficiency of sheep, to say the least. Then there were the fleeces,



knitted items,



and strange creatures made out of a variety of vegetables and Haribos.


We moved on to Northumbria, where there were more sheep, this time amongst the ruins of a Roman fort.



Cheviots maybe?

But things really got serious when we got to the Lake District, because not only were there sheep,

there were sheep that are different colors depending on their age.

These are Herdwicks, the sheep that children's author Beatrix Potter was instrumental in preserving when she donated 4000 acres of land to the National Trust.

Herdwicks are born black, lighten to a lovely chocolate brown over the course of the first year, and finally end up white as adults. I was smitten. So was the Wee Ridiculous Dog, who happily chased sheep whenever he got the opportunity.

Thankfully he's not too threatening, and the sheep were none too spooked. They mostly ran twenty feet away and went back to grazing. These sheep have been bred to be territorial, so they don't leave their designated pasture area. Which explains why there are vast herds of sheep wandering freely on the fells of Cumbria with no fences or enclosures of any kind, except for an occasional stone sheep pen.

It's a magical place, to be sure. Somehow I made it home with out any fleece or wool products of any kind, which has got to be some kind of miracle.

In which I bite off more then I can chew

aka: porpoise is easily distracted and prone to startitis, which is not necessarily a good thing.

So. I mentioned a few posts back that I had decided to join a knitalong for Stephanie Lotven's Right as Rainbow baby cardigan. This is a super cute little baby sweater, with the opportunity for loads of bright colors, and it just so happens that I have a super cute Wee Nephew who lives in an appropriate climate for a wool-cotton blend sweater. So I shanghied Allison's Spud and Chloe sweater scraps, and started off.

After a disastrous (at least from my perspective) last-day-of-summer-vacation trip to the cinema with Boo (note to NPH: you are dead to me now. DEAD!!!! I am still weeping from the inhumanity of it all..), I had one sleeve done.

After some much-needed brainless knitting over the end of last week, I had two sleeves.

Now I have much of the body up to the armpits done - I'm going to keep going until I run out of yarn on this one.

I needed a couple more colors, so yesterday I fell down in Mrs. Moon, and got two more skeins of S&C Sweater to finish off the stripes on the yoke:

So, so, so soft and squishy. I love it. I wish it weren't quite so pricey, but for Wee H, no expense will be spared. I got Grape Jelly and Lake to go with Firecracker, Grass and Splash from Allison, and Brown Sheep Cotton Top (long discontinued!) in Natural and a darkish Brown. There will, thankfully, be enough Grape Jelly and Lake to make another sweater or two, although probably at a smaller size. Then I'll just need to find babies to give them too...

Road trip!

Hello blog! I've missed you. Things have been a wee bit nutty around here in the last week, but I'm hoping things have calmed down enough for me to be able to get back to the regular schedule of life. I have at least three long blogposts worth of pictures to share with you, most of which are from our travels around Yorkshire and the Lake District before school started last week. But I want to share a somewhat shorter, less-child-focused road trip that I took over the weekend with Allison up to Toft Alpacas.

Let me just start by saying this post is totally a ploy to be able to post a metric ton of cute alpaca pictures, with a little yarn on the side. You have been warned. If you need more alpaca cuteness, there are more photos over on Flickr.

We pulled in to the car park by these lovely ladies, and then headed inside for a day of playing with colors under the expert tutelage of Debbie Tomkies of DT Craft & Design.

The Toft Studio is a fabulous place, full of their yarn and patterns knitted up, all in a glorious array of natural colors.




Then it was time to get to work. First up were some samples with varying dye concentrations in the same color.


Then some experiments in color blending...

While those samples were cooked and rinsed, we went out for a quick tour of the Toft Alpacas farm. **WARNING: MANY, MANY PICTURES OF ADORABLE FUZZY BEASTIES AHEAD**

There they were, hanging out in a field, minding their own business, when SQUEEEEEE - CRIA!!!!



You can bury me now - I am dead from the adorableness.

Then we went into one of the paddocks (are they called paddocks in the UK? Must investigate...). Our guide said "Alpaca are very inquisitive." Indeed:





Ded. Ded of the cutes. I am now in desperate need of my own herd of alpaca to keep in the back garden. I'm sure Himself and the neighbors, not to mention the Richmond-upon-Thames Borough Council, will totally understand...

After our walk, we moved on to 25 gr skeins of lace weight that had been mis-packaged by the mill (i.e. 25 gr instead of 100 gr).

and eventually to full skeins. That's Allison's skein of Jacob Aran-weight (which came out amazingly - check out her photo!), and I did a skein of BFL sock yarn.


Everyone ended up with gorgeous yarns!



(the two on the right in this picture are mine)

And before we left, I managed to do something I'd wanted to do all day...

It was a fabulous day, and many thanks to Debbie and the folks at Toft for making it happen!